Squeg is comedy show played out in daylight, set to the wafting of freely distributed paper plate fans and taking place in front of a tatty black curtain. By his own admission Seymour Mace is a man who favours the simple over the complicated and this hour of classically daft comedy shows how effective simple ideas can be.
The first half-hour of Squeg (a portmanteau of “square peg” that Mace admits is essentially meaningless) plays out as a typical stand up set, but Mace’s combination of engaging honesty with playful weirdness really draws the audience in. He describes the on-going battle with clinical depression that first led him into comedy, comments on how tedious and draining your most cherished pastime can become once you make it into career and blithely recounts an anecdote involving a papier-mâché model of his own head. It isn’t elegant; Mace uses four-letter words as punctuation rather than for any particular emphasis. It is, however, very, very funny. Later Mace shows off a few marker pen pictures drawn as part of his therapy and here the set does stumble a bit. The drawings are quite amusing, but a little over-reliant on the ‘putting random words together’ style of humour.
Immediately after, however, the tack suddenly changes and things shift up a gear. Mace moves from his scripted material to almost a solid half-hour of crowd-generated jokes. Every audience member contributes a question, phrase or even just a word on a piece of paper and Mace draws them out and plays off of them. It may not be the same story every night, but on the performance I saw this section was simply masterful. Mace proved himself able to turn anything, no matter how bland, into a joke. Sometimes a suggestion led so effortlessly into a story or one-liner that I would have suspected there being a few plants in the mix, had audience members not owned up to putting them in. It wasn’t always perfect; one suggested mention of “superpowers” led to an extended riff on the visual similarity between Clark Kent and Superman, a joke that practically predates comedy. However, that sort of thing is a good deal more forgivable when it’s coming off the cuff.
The show carries an air of ramshackle brilliance and anyone with an eye for good stand up should try to make time for it. As previously mentioned, it may not be as good every time, but the confidence Mace showed last night makes me think you’ll be grateful you took the plunge.
